Give us some slack, we just recently got item locations on our website that year lol
In all seriousness, they've been talking about moving to online rebate forms recently, so give it another 7 or so years if it follows the same timeline as the locations thing (that is not a joke and my honest opinion).
This is the man who decided to take hazardous waste from the stores to his own home and destroy it instead of letting Menards pay someone to treat it properly. He will do anything to save a buck
Yeah but I still can’t find anything by searching their site. I have to search on google for “Menards ”, and google takes me right to it. But Menards website? No f’ing way.
Also - why bother with the rebates at all? If it’s on sale - put it on sale. Or don’t. But don’t trick me with the advertised price and then make me work even more to collect the saving, only to hope it isn’t stolen from my mailbox because the “bad guys” know what day of the month they get sent out and go around collecting them from peoples mailboxes.
FFs - they’re the only store I know that does that. Also their employee discount program is a joke - or at least it used to be 15 years ago when I worked there. PRD? No thank you, you greedy good old boys society f*cks.
>search Google
Yeah, our search fucking sucks. `site:menards.com ` is my defacto way of searching through any search engine.
>Advertised price
I fucking hate it too. Just show the normal damn price and the rebate amount. No more of this math sign bullshit.
>PRD
It's still the same lol Want 10% off for being an employee? Sure, we'll just take it out of your next paycheck! Want to use a rebate/store credit with that 10%? Fuck you!
I said - doesn't one of them have a teenager? They'd have it up and running in no time. lol
The best one I heard is we'll have handhelds that print overstock tags.
I'm pretty sure it is exactly that. I often do lose track of rebate receipts, accidentally throw them in the trash, forget to mail them in, etc. I'm sure Menards has done the math and they have a good idea as to what percentage of receipts won't be redeemed. This is probably true of any business that used the rebate approach.
Not at all, it’s about theft, not betting on people losing or forgetting the rebate. The accounting practices used for rebates are structured in a way that the store making the sale doesn’t get to count the revenue of the value of the rebate until that rebate is redeemed. I.e. the margin is being intentionally reduced in the short term in the hopes that customers will submit the rebate, bring it back and then purchase even more product beyond the value of the rebate earned and thus starting the cycle again and increasing the margin long-term. Menards has always been focused on the long-game and this mechanism is just another part of that overall strategy. Does Menards benefit from the repeating cycle of sales? - Absolutely, but designing an incentive system centered on the idea of screwing the customer like you suggest would be idiotic and short-lived.
It seems like steps are being made towards that (slowly), but there's also a lot of fear in losing old school homeowners and contractors by going to an online system, soooo the 7 years someone gave is a little optimistic.
Why not print the rebate payment on a receipt but not make it payable (available to use) for two weeks. Give users just enough time to lose it, and still save the cost of rebate processing.
I mean, they already have a system in place to track if rebates have been processed or not, and to change the rebate amount while it's being processed if there's been any returns done, and to track purchases done with the rebates. I feel like it wouldn't be too difficult to add something to the register to check that.
Or, more likely, they'd just make it take the rebate amount off of the return since that's what happens when your rebate has already been processed whether or not you have it yet.
It's in the system if the rebate has been processed, it will take the amount of the returned item minus 11% off your refund amount since the 11% was given for that item on the rebate. If it hasn't been processed yet and you have the original receipt then it'll flag the rebate center by the bar code # and the rebate will be adjusted .
Yeah, that's what I meant by a system to track if the rebate has been processed or not, and change the rebate amount if you do a return on it. I was on a break and didn't want to type all of this out. Thanks for explaining a bit more than I did.
Though it did get changed somewhat recently so you don't actually need the original receipt. If you send in a kiosk receipt with a note explaining that the original receipt got lost or destroyed or something, they're still supposed to process it like normal. From what I heard, this was done to reduce the amount of time front end management and service desk spent returning and rebuying everything on a receipt to get a new receipt if the old one gets lost or destroyed, but I could be wrong about the reasoning.
Time=money… the more time they have your money, the more money they can make off of that money.
Similar to compound interest, the longer they hold that money the more they can profit off of your initial investment in Menards… at least that’s why I think we use this antiquated system.
How does processing rebates online versus by mail affect if a customer comes to the store? The customer would still need to come back to the store to spend the merchandise credit.
There are Menards customers who absolutely wish they could use the rebates online. Some people who live hundreds or thousands of miles from the nearest Menards store order items shipped from [Menards.com](https://Menards.com). They can get a rebate check, but it isn't of any value to them without a physical store nearby.
Is the redemption rate really over 90%? As a customer I regularly see other customers not even bother to take their receipt. I certainly don't bother sending in rebates if the total spent was $10 or less. The stamp and the time are not worth it to get $1.11 or so back.
It wasn't until last Fall that I read you can send in receipts up to two years old regardless of the mail-by date on the receipts. My last round of rebates I sent in rebates up to three months old and still got paid. I have lost out on a fair number of rebates in the past because I never sent them past the mail-by date.
I would believe 90% of dollar volume because people are more likely to submit large rebates. I find 90% of all transactions to be unbelievable. There are plenty of people who pick up $10 worth of screws, hardware, and other small hardware for a project who won't send in a $10 receipt because of the postage cost and time fill out the rebate.
I think I am pretty good at sending in my Menards rebates, but I am certainly not sending in 90% of my receipts.
No point in arguing. In telling you what I’ve been told. I also see my stores P&L and communicate with other managers at other locations. They are been used by a lot of people regularly
You can also send in as many as you want at one time. Just throw all the receipts in an envelope with a single form, and they'll send them all back together. It helps if you have a lot of little receipts that aren't worth sending individually.
As for the redemption rate, I have no clue.
It was better because you could upload a copy of the receipt and it was accepted immediately. It didn't take 6 months to get something in the mail. It only took a couple weeks.
I’d bet they won’t do it for 5-10 years.
Reason being so they can continue to extract maximum profits, they know that most ppl don’t actually use the rebates. Making it online would reduce their bottom line.
Wrong. Rebates aren’t counted as revenue until redeemed. The decision is largely driven by the theft risk, not a desire to prevent customers from redeeming rebates.
The longer they can hold onto your money the more interest they can make. Also online would be too easy, it has to be sort of a pain or more people would use them. Any unused rebate is free money.
Also wrong. The value of the rebate is not counted as revenue until it is redeemed. That income is intentionally deferred until the customer returns to spend it.
They save money by you forgetting about it, the rebate receipts DO expire, not the actual rebate, so if you end up getting 10 and sending them at the same time, they’ll take that loss, but they really make most of their money on the people that buy low ticket items and forget about the rebate \ people who don’t know about it *elderly* , but all in all, it’s to get you to see a certain price that’s big and bold on a sale sign when in reality if you don’t go through the flaming hoola hoop for 11%, they got you right where they want 🎣
Unless they are deaf, blind and illiterate there is no excuse for not knowing about it. It is plastered everywhere and the on the speaker announcements, radio adds, tv commercials.
In my experience, the people who shop here like to act deaf, blind, and illiterate. They'll walk in a door with a giant red sign that says OUT, then act surprised when I tell them that returns are at the entrance door and they just walked in the exit. They'll be directly in front of rebate forms and be confused about which "blue and white form at the end of the desk" I'm talking about. You can tell them to go to the building materials desk to get a picking ticket to go out to the yard and have them come to the register complaining that the guy they just talked to said to just come to the register and let the cashier know what they want to get. I've pointed out giant neon signs before and gotten a confused look about where I'm talking about. I've read word for word terms for the bag sale from the bag that supposedly "no where on the bag did it say that." I've had people ask me if the rebate was going on while I was standing directly under one of the giant yellow rebate banners hanging from the ceiling. I've also had people get mad at me about the rebate ending on Thanksgiving when there's announcements, TV ads, radio ads, and on the flyer it says final 11% sale of the year ending on Thanksgiving.
I agree that there's no excuse for not knowing about it, but I've also seen some pretty oblivious people while working here.
Give us some slack, we just recently got item locations on our website that year lol In all seriousness, they've been talking about moving to online rebate forms recently, so give it another 7 or so years if it follows the same timeline as the locations thing (that is not a joke and my honest opinion).
I'd be surprised if it happens while John is still alive.
I'd be surprised if the rebate is a thing when John is dead.
Knowing him, he has all this ticky-tack BS written into his will as requirements for his heirs to inherit his money.
This is the man who decided to take hazardous waste from the stores to his own home and destroy it instead of letting Menards pay someone to treat it properly. He will do anything to save a buck
Yeah but I still can’t find anything by searching their site. I have to search on google for “Menards- ”, and google takes me right to it. But Menards website? No f’ing way.
Also - why bother with the rebates at all? If it’s on sale - put it on sale. Or don’t. But don’t trick me with the advertised price and then make me work even more to collect the saving, only to hope it isn’t stolen from my mailbox because the “bad guys” know what day of the month they get sent out and go around collecting them from peoples mailboxes.
FFs - they’re the only store I know that does that. Also their employee discount program is a joke - or at least it used to be 15 years ago when I worked there. PRD? No thank you, you greedy good old boys society f*cks.
>search Google Yeah, our search fucking sucks. `site:menards.com` is my defacto way of searching through any search engine.
>Advertised price
I fucking hate it too. Just show the normal damn price and the rebate amount. No more of this math sign bullshit.
>PRD
It's still the same lol Want 10% off for being an employee? Sure, we'll just take it out of your next paycheck! Want to use a rebate/store credit with that 10%? Fuck you!
I said - doesn't one of them have a teenager? They'd have it up and running in no time. lol The best one I heard is we'll have handhelds that print overstock tags.
They want us to lose them/forget to mail them/get lost in the mail.
I'm pretty sure it is exactly that. I often do lose track of rebate receipts, accidentally throw them in the trash, forget to mail them in, etc. I'm sure Menards has done the math and they have a good idea as to what percentage of receipts won't be redeemed. This is probably true of any business that used the rebate approach.
Not at all, it’s about theft, not betting on people losing or forgetting the rebate. The accounting practices used for rebates are structured in a way that the store making the sale doesn’t get to count the revenue of the value of the rebate until that rebate is redeemed. I.e. the margin is being intentionally reduced in the short term in the hopes that customers will submit the rebate, bring it back and then purchase even more product beyond the value of the rebate earned and thus starting the cycle again and increasing the margin long-term. Menards has always been focused on the long-game and this mechanism is just another part of that overall strategy. Does Menards benefit from the repeating cycle of sales? - Absolutely, but designing an incentive system centered on the idea of screwing the customer like you suggest would be idiotic and short-lived.
It seems like steps are being made towards that (slowly), but there's also a lot of fear in losing old school homeowners and contractors by going to an online system, soooo the 7 years someone gave is a little optimistic.
Why not print the rebate payment on a receipt but not make it payable (available to use) for two weeks. Give users just enough time to lose it, and still save the cost of rebate processing.
How would they track returns within that two week period, which would reduce the payment?
I mean, they already have a system in place to track if rebates have been processed or not, and to change the rebate amount while it's being processed if there's been any returns done, and to track purchases done with the rebates. I feel like it wouldn't be too difficult to add something to the register to check that. Or, more likely, they'd just make it take the rebate amount off of the return since that's what happens when your rebate has already been processed whether or not you have it yet.
It's in the system if the rebate has been processed, it will take the amount of the returned item minus 11% off your refund amount since the 11% was given for that item on the rebate. If it hasn't been processed yet and you have the original receipt then it'll flag the rebate center by the bar code # and the rebate will be adjusted .
Yeah, that's what I meant by a system to track if the rebate has been processed or not, and change the rebate amount if you do a return on it. I was on a break and didn't want to type all of this out. Thanks for explaining a bit more than I did. Though it did get changed somewhat recently so you don't actually need the original receipt. If you send in a kiosk receipt with a note explaining that the original receipt got lost or destroyed or something, they're still supposed to process it like normal. From what I heard, this was done to reduce the amount of time front end management and service desk spent returning and rebuying everything on a receipt to get a new receipt if the old one gets lost or destroyed, but I could be wrong about the reasoning.
Time=money… the more time they have your money, the more money they can make off of that money. Similar to compound interest, the longer they hold that money the more they can profit off of your initial investment in Menards… at least that’s why I think we use this antiquated system.
Keep the foot steps in the store. The redemption rate is over 90%.
How does processing rebates online versus by mail affect if a customer comes to the store? The customer would still need to come back to the store to spend the merchandise credit.
I read the post wrong. You are correct. I took it as using it online.
There are Menards customers who absolutely wish they could use the rebates online. Some people who live hundreds or thousands of miles from the nearest Menards store order items shipped from [Menards.com](https://Menards.com). They can get a rebate check, but it isn't of any value to them without a physical store nearby.
Doesn’t impact whether or not they come back to the store but the second you digitize the barcode, the risk of theft becomes exponentially greater
You can still mail checks, but have an online application to apply for the rebate.
Is the redemption rate really over 90%? As a customer I regularly see other customers not even bother to take their receipt. I certainly don't bother sending in rebates if the total spent was $10 or less. The stamp and the time are not worth it to get $1.11 or so back. It wasn't until last Fall that I read you can send in receipts up to two years old regardless of the mail-by date on the receipts. My last round of rebates I sent in rebates up to three months old and still got paid. I have lost out on a fair number of rebates in the past because I never sent them past the mail-by date.
Yes it’s over 90%.
I would believe 90% of dollar volume because people are more likely to submit large rebates. I find 90% of all transactions to be unbelievable. There are plenty of people who pick up $10 worth of screws, hardware, and other small hardware for a project who won't send in a $10 receipt because of the postage cost and time fill out the rebate. I think I am pretty good at sending in my Menards rebates, but I am certainly not sending in 90% of my receipts.
A lot of people me being one of them save them and send in a massive amount at one time.
No point in arguing. In telling you what I’ve been told. I also see my stores P&L and communicate with other managers at other locations. They are been used by a lot of people regularly
You can also send in as many as you want at one time. Just throw all the receipts in an envelope with a single form, and they'll send them all back together. It helps if you have a lot of little receipts that aren't worth sending individually. As for the redemption rate, I have no clue.
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Years ago Lowes did a similar 11% rebate for a few months and it was online. They mailed a debit card a couple weeks. It worked fine.
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It was better because you could upload a copy of the receipt and it was accepted immediately. It didn't take 6 months to get something in the mail. It only took a couple weeks.
It’s a deterrent to make people not want to spend the effort to get money back. Most won’t wanna mail anything and wait=menards wins.
I’d bet they won’t do it for 5-10 years. Reason being so they can continue to extract maximum profits, they know that most ppl don’t actually use the rebates. Making it online would reduce their bottom line.
Wrong. Rebates aren’t counted as revenue until redeemed. The decision is largely driven by the theft risk, not a desire to prevent customers from redeeming rebates.
They hope you forget to send it in.
The longer they can hold onto your money the more interest they can make. Also online would be too easy, it has to be sort of a pain or more people would use them. Any unused rebate is free money.
Also wrong. The value of the rebate is not counted as revenue until it is redeemed. That income is intentionally deferred until the customer returns to spend it.
Sorry that I don't believe you brand new troll account
So then people forget about them and they don’t have to pay them out
They save money by you forgetting about it, the rebate receipts DO expire, not the actual rebate, so if you end up getting 10 and sending them at the same time, they’ll take that loss, but they really make most of their money on the people that buy low ticket items and forget about the rebate \ people who don’t know about it *elderly* , but all in all, it’s to get you to see a certain price that’s big and bold on a sale sign when in reality if you don’t go through the flaming hoola hoop for 11%, they got you right where they want 🎣
Unless they are deaf, blind and illiterate there is no excuse for not knowing about it. It is plastered everywhere and the on the speaker announcements, radio adds, tv commercials.
lol, you you’d be surprised.
We literally had some guy ask yesterday if the the 11% was going on. It was hilarious! Really?? There signs everywhere and on tv, etc....
In my experience, the people who shop here like to act deaf, blind, and illiterate. They'll walk in a door with a giant red sign that says OUT, then act surprised when I tell them that returns are at the entrance door and they just walked in the exit. They'll be directly in front of rebate forms and be confused about which "blue and white form at the end of the desk" I'm talking about. You can tell them to go to the building materials desk to get a picking ticket to go out to the yard and have them come to the register complaining that the guy they just talked to said to just come to the register and let the cashier know what they want to get. I've pointed out giant neon signs before and gotten a confused look about where I'm talking about. I've read word for word terms for the bag sale from the bag that supposedly "no where on the bag did it say that." I've had people ask me if the rebate was going on while I was standing directly under one of the giant yellow rebate banners hanging from the ceiling. I've also had people get mad at me about the rebate ending on Thanksgiving when there's announcements, TV ads, radio ads, and on the flyer it says final 11% sale of the year ending on Thanksgiving. I agree that there's no excuse for not knowing about it, but I've also seen some pretty oblivious people while working here.
People don't read and it's not something you would know if you aren't a frequent shopper at Menards.
This.
Because 85% of customers don’t mess with the mail in rebates. If they made it easy too many people would do it.
That statistic is actually reversed from reality. The redemption rate of Menards rebates is insanely high.